Slashdot Mirror
Gates Expresses Surprise Over IE8 Secrecy
eldavojohn writes "Shortly following the frustrations of IE7, Gates claims that he is unaware that IE8 Secrecy has been alienating developers. Ten influential bloggers met with Bill on Tuesday and asked Gates questions about why they are no longer receiving information on IE. From Molly Holzschlag's blog: 'Something seems to have changed, where there is no messaging now for the last six months to a year going out on the IE team. They seem to have lost the transparency that they had. This conversation [between Web developers and the IE team] seems to have been pretty much shut down, and I'm very concerned as to why that is.' To which Bill replied: 'I'll have to ask [IE general manager] Dean [Hachamovitch] what the hell is going on, I mean, we're not, there's not like some deep secret about what we're doing with IE.'"
For a year or more now Microsoft has been getting tighter and tighter about what information about their plans and dates can get out. It has been really bad getting info even when you are on one of their TAP programs. Date for the RTM? Hell - you won't even get a date for the next Beta version most of the time. What's in? What's out? Not a chance - you'll get it when you get it. It is so bad now that they need a Minster of Truth to determine what to tell people - http://www.istartedsomething.com/20071207/director-windows-disclosure/.
If Vista has taught us anything, it's that Microsoft is laser-focused on superficial and eye-candy improvements, while caring very little about improving (or even fixing) the underlying technologies. From my (thankfully VERY brief) experience with Vista, it looks like the only thing they even remotely attempted to fix or improve was security, and that... well, heh, it reminded me of a maxim I once heard: "Those who do not understand Unix are doomed to reinvent it--badly."
My prediction is that IE 8 will have exactly the same rendering capabilities, but it will have some sort of annoying new UI, plus maybe a few extremely annoying security features that everyone will turn off immediately.
The problem is that Trident is also used as an all purpose rendering engine. Just about everything you can think of that renders "something", aside from big hot shots companies, will use Trident to render their content...so break Trident, you break everything. Thats part of why upgrades to it are so incremental and never revolutionary.
Now, why don't they change the engine in IE while keeping both versions for backward compatibility? Thats the more interesting question.
Get rid of the Trusted Site, Internet, Untrusted security model and just have Untrusted.
So even your company intranet should be untrusted (Restricted Sites), and not allowed to use ANY plugins or Javascript? Ya, great plan. Lets not forget how useless many other sites would be.
I once joked with a colleague that Internet Explorer has probably wiped billions off pounds off the world economy. I laughed, paused for a moment, and realised it's probably completely true. What could the world have done with all those countless hours hacking their CSS to support the trash that is Internet Explorer?
It's actually completely false. Your argument is similar to that used by those pushing "traffic safety" measures. Higher insurance rates / costs from accidents don't damage the economy, they actually contribute to it. You may not be happy paying $100 more to your insurance that you could put elsewhere, but its certainly not hurting the economy at all. If anything, the bugs in IE contribute to the economy, as more money is required to move through the system to account for them.
He specifically said pages served in xhtml.
Very, very few pages are served this way, it's usually text/html.
Xhtml is suppose to break!
I hope you were joking about "Meet the standards and innovate on top of them". The browser war was terrible for developers. You obviously don't remember trying to program Javascript during the Netscape 4 days. Anybody who knows anything about web development knows that you don't do layout with "tags" you do layout with CSS. It's different than doing layout with HTML Tables and Tags, but it makes your website much more flexible. CSS3 is coming, and it will provide us with even more features.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
While superficially correct, this is a case of the broken window fallacy. The money spent working around IE bugs could be spent better elsewhere (for instance, QA, usability, etc.).
>>Now, why don't they change the engine in IE while keeping both versions for backward compatibility? Thats the more interesting question.
The same reason why they didn't break all backward compatibility for Vista and use a sandboxed WinXP emulator for older applications.
MSFT managers won't think out side the box.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
As long as the baseline standards are met, who cares? Nobody sane will use proprietary tags. All it does is make the other browser maker go "those bastards! they have curvy corner tags! lets steal the thing and enhance it by add drop shadows too!". Now we've got drop shadowed DIV's with curvy corners in CSS. Each browser maker will copy the other guy's syntax, improve it a bit, and kick it back out the market.
:-)
Look at the IFRAME. You think that little fairly useful tag came from the W3C? Look at all the other tags you've got in HTML. How many of them were dreamed up by the eggheads at the W3C? I'm no historian, but I'd wager most of the useful bits of HTML and possibly CSS we have today is not because of the W3C, but a byproduct of the IE vs. Netscape wars of way back when. Shit, we even have the useful BLINK tag!!
The W3C is horrible at cranking out useful standards - those guys seem more interested in hearing themselves talk. They want you to give up tables for a grid layout (which is a good move) but provide no direct replacement. Yes you can rid yourself of tables, but you do so with a hack. Hell, wasn't the TABLE tag something from Netscape?
Bottom line? The only way we will evolve on the web is with another bloody tag war.
At least, in my opinion. I could be wrong you know
OT: He did donate billions to charity that Gates made off of the technically illegal monoply. Do you think this has done more harm or good, stifled innovation in computing, helped the world in other ways, Think if it was Larry Ellison running MSFT, that greedy prick would not give a dime away and would be using same anti-competitive stategies. Perhaps the "secret" in ie 8 is that it ties into Sharepoint, OCS etc, the whole .net 3.0 bs & live services, they want you to think your running windows on your [symbian, linux, java, etc] mobile device. Web Servies need to be open and inter operable, hope Android makes MSFT's plan for live services harder.
And as a professional, you no longer have the luxury afforded to the "my CSS is art" drama-queens.
As a professional, you should be more concerned with the viability of your design to meet your clients goals
Precisely. As a professional, it takes longer to do something if I have to work around Internet Explorer's shortcomings, the end result isn't as good, and I have to say no to some features. As a professional, I resent the fact that Internet Explorer is a constant dead weight around my neck, limiting the quality of service I can provide my clients.
Now, if you do your job, you'd develop on IE first, and then go to the client and say "With another day, I can make this design work for the
Uh, no way. If you do it that way around, you spend a whole lot longer overall when the client inevitably says that they don't want to throw away that 30% of customers. The optimal approach is to develop on a conforming browser first, using only the subset of features that Internet Explorer supports, and then apply fixes for everything Internet Explorer screws up anyway. And any professional is going to look at the subset, and look at the required fixes, and recognise that Internet Explorer is a colossal waste of everybody's time and that it would be a gigantic leap forward if Microsoft were to simply fix their bugs, and they would also recognise that it's entirely possible for the world's largest software corporation to do it if they actually wanted to. Christ, there are lone developers that have produced more conformant CSS implementations than Microsoft. It's not petulant to resent Microsoft for deliberately holding back an entire industry.
This is a complete load of crap: "The only reason it is the world's number one browser is because it comes pre-installed with WIndows."
Every version of Windows has Notepad and Wordpad. However, these are not the worlds number one text editors... There are better editors out and people spend a lot of money to get them (or download a free half-ass knockoff from the web). Either way, they go out of thier way to get something better. Why not do this for a browser? That's an easy one: IE7 works pretty well and there is nothing out that is significantly better.
I have downloaded and used FireFox just to see if it is really that much better than IE. It is not. If IE is an ugly building I would have to say that it is surrounded by many more just like it except not as tall. I use IE7 every single day and have almost zero problems. Where do you get this crap?
>Navigation on the right, content and comments in the middle, links and tools on the right. No, that's not a newspaper layout (which have more than 3 columns, in case you've never opened one!), and it makes at least some fucking sense.
/. as '2 columns'.
You are assuming that the GP and everyone else doesn't take advantage of Preferences to get rid of that useless right column, which I did years ago and don't remember what the settings were. Perhaps the GP also surfs
(Personally, I think 3 columns for a SINGLE piece of content is stupid, but using it to frame smaller scraps/elements is perfectly OK. I mean, what are people supposed to do.. be forced into making everything one ROW the width of the screen??)
Back to the point, I agree that CSS has poor vertical support, which is the big complaint. The counter to that (and it is quite valid) is that you're designing for your monitor at something else's expense, or assumptions other's can' meet. So what, I say PROVIDED that the content remains ACCESSIBLE and MACHINE READABLE.
People DO want web apps, and they want them to operate like desktop apps. If CSS and DOM can't manage to grow like that, I already know what's going to happen... we're going to see Microsoft push something like 'Avalon' or desktop-app-XML onto the web. And you know what? People will LOVE it.. especially if IE does that and eliminates bugs that USERS care about (note I didn't say developers... MS has called them "pawns")
It's also interesting that Microsoft has been bickering with the Javascript folks, because Microsoft wants Javascript to receive no more improvements. What's Microsoft working on, and how far outside W3.org recommendations is it? Microsoft has realized that IE7 is pretty close to FF, so they can go pack to what they were working on before the emergency decision to even make an IE7.
Sorry for the rambling thoughts.. it's late and I'm distracted. Hope this makes sense.
The graph isn't linear, though a small enough slice may look linear. It's one of those S-shaped titration curves. Firefox 3 will push us a bit further...
Whether Microsoft realizes it or not, they've pretty much lost this round of the browser wars. I don't know what their statistics are these days but even if they were still at 90% it wouldn't matter, because they've lost almost 100% of the mind share that actually matters - the developers. And oddly enough, it has very little to do with their awful support of standards. There was a time not long ago when it made financial sense to develop only for IE. IE was 90% of the market, and an average dev team could cut enough time off of their launch schedule that it more than made up for the number of users that you might lose by not fully supporting other browsers. Their buggy and nonstandard rendering wasn't a big deal, because you could still do reasonably well as a developer coding to the bugs and ignoring the standards.
.NET developer, I have zero motivation to even install Silverlight, much less develop against it.)
Where Microsoft completely missed the boat was on the developer tools. First the Web Developer Toolbar for Firefox and now Firebug. The IE web developer toolbar is an utter joke. The script debugger is awful. Debugging through Visual Studio is pretty nice (if you have it) but it's not nearly as convenient as Firebug's integrated debugger, or even Venkman. It's been two years since I knew a web developer that used IE as their primary development platform. Even when working on sites that only have to target IE (the site that I am writing now will only be used on IE6 - ouch) we still develop on Firefox first and then fix it in IE once it works in Firefox.
Even if IE8 regains 95% of the market, they still won't have the same control over the web that they had with IE6 unless they drastically improve the developer experience. With IE6 one could argue that it made financial sense to ignore other browsers. As long as it's either to develop in other browsers than it is in IE, Microsoft will never achieve that kind of dominance again.
(I also have to agree with the poster quoted on the front page the other day. As long as Microsoft shows this level of neglect for IE developers, why in the world would we consider using any of their other technologies. Even as a
If I don't put anything here, will anyone recognize me anymore?
May be slightly OT but still.
The way I remember it [and I have been coding HTML since, oh, '95], the IFRAME tag was m$' answer to Navigator 4 having a 'src' attribute for a DIV so you could load an external document in it. There was also a JavaScript method/property to change or retrieve the contents of a DIV. To me, this seemed like a sensible, logical and very useful extension of the DIV tag.
Along then, with the advent of MSIE4[?] came the abhorrence called IFRAME since m$ had to have the same functionality [but in a different fashion, obviously]. A frame is a window object and where the hell is the logic in embedding a window in another window?
And then there's the difficulties when scripting IFRAMEs. Try getting to the document.body of a page in an IFRAME. Or even worse, since in MSIE the event is a property of the window, have fun trying to intercept events in an IFRAME.
And then, to make matters worse, the w3c, in its infinite wisdom, decided to standardize IFRAMEs over the DIV src attribute, probably trying to pick features in equal measure from MSIE and Navigator when they standardized the DOM.
Blech, I detest IFRAMEs.
I hope someone develops a browser that has a modular CSS enguine and leave the hooks open for anyone to use so you can plug in the CSS engine that you like. Then, CSS support can develop asynchronous from teh HTML engine and movement can accelerate on supporting the standards.
Ads are in iframes. The iframe wouldnt load but the main page would.
That puts it in the ad company's best interests to make it work.